Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page A

shipboard translator rendered the runes that flowed across the bottom of the image.
    â€œFriends, come at once. Something is rushing our way. Something very dangerous.”

8
    Â 
    Sigmund tossed and turned to the accompaniment of faint moans from the adjoining cabin. He didn’t blame Kirsten and Eric, reunited after what only Sigmund thought of as more than a month. His empathy didn’t make their urgent lovemaking any easier to overhear.
    Sigmund missed his entire family, terribly, but right now his thoughts were on Penny. Well, not his thoughts, exactly.
    He had to laugh. You would think someone approaching two centuries old could handle a bit of celibacy. Only you would be wrong. His memories—such of them as he retained—reached that far into the past, but he had arrived on New Terra in the body of a twenty-year-old. Only Carlos Wu’s nanotech-enabled, experimental autodoc could have put Sigmund back together. Soon after, Nessus had whisked away the prototype. The
lone
prototype. No one else on New Terra would be rejuvenated as Sigmund had been.
    Well, Sigmund had saved Carlos’s life once. Use of the autodoc made them even.
    With a groan, Sigmund collapsed his sleeper field and settled slowly to the deck. He wasn’t going to sleep, so he might as well get up. A bit of exercise, he decided, and maybe a snack. Then, if sleep remained elusive, something productive.
    Away from the crew cabins,
Don Quixote
’s corridors were deathly quiet. The name was Sigmund’s little joke. How did one explain a quixotic pursuit to people who had never read Cervantes? When asked to explain, Sigmund would say, “It’s a long story.”
    He paced from stem to stern, engine room to bridge. The ship was basically a cylinder with rounded ends, about 110 feet in diameter. It provided ample pacing room. He whistled tunelessly as he went, patting the hull for its reassuring solidity.
    Don Quixote
was one of the few vessels in New Terra’s tiny fleet made by the Puppeteers’ General Products Corporation. The vessel was built in the #3 hull model. Before vanishing from Known Space, fleeing from the core explosion, General Products had advertised their hulls as all but indestructible.
    Yes, but.
    There are many obscure ways to die. Once upon a time, Sigmund had voraciously read and vidded mystery stories. The more impossible the crime, the more educational. Locked-room mysteries were the most instructive of all.
    GP hulls were sort of like that.
    As only a paranoid mind could, Sigmund began obsessing on the ways this hull could fail to protect him.
    Hit something hard enough and passengers became stains on a stillunblemished hull.
    And: Antimatter in sufficient quantities would destroy
anything
made of normal matter. But antimatter was scarce. The trick was to find enough.
    And: Visible light passed right through the hull. The Puppeteers considered transparency a feature, not a flaw. You painted a GP hull where you wanted to block the light. So: A laser beam held on target long enough would vaporize the coating and overcome any antiflare shielding and pour unabated through the still-intact hull.
    And: Each GP hull, it turned out, was a single artificial molecule, its interatomic bonds massively reinforced by an embedded power plant. It took an extremely lucky shot—or a nearby, stationary target—to fry the embedded power plant with a laser, but it could be done. Without the power plant, air pressure alone would burst the weakened hull.
    And: There was at least one other way, one Sigmund had yet to fathom, to destroy a GP hull. Puppeteers had once destroyed a GP-hulled ship with a crew of ARMs aboard. Another time, they had destroyed, all at once, every GP hull in New Terra’s tiny navy.
    Baedeker had worked for General Products Corporation, and Sigmund sensed the engineer knew more than he would admit—which was nothing—about these events. An autodestruct code, Sigmund